UConn Trying To Find Footing, Keep March Goals In Mind

Two Losses To Open Conference Schedule A Hit To NCAA Tourney Hopes

DALLAS — Coming into this season, UConn knew that its Ratings Percentage Index ranking could be a concern. Sure, the conventional thinking went, the Huskies could waltz through the new American Athletic Conference, but would strength of that schedule be good enough?

Now that UConn has stumbled home after its first two conference games, the RPI concern is just a bit different.

Will the Huskies win enough games?

Houston and Southern Methodist hit the Huskies with a one-two punch that will knock them from the national rankings this week and, more importantly, from No. 25 to the mid-40s in RPI, one of the measuring sticks for NCAA Tournament worthiness. The official rankings begin coming from the NCAA this month. SMU was 61st in RPI, Houston, 254th (Ouch).

"It was a disappointing trip," coach Kevin Ollie said. "We'll go home now and hopefully we'll have our fans behind us and we'll figure it out. We've got to decide real, real quick. We can't keep doing the same things. It starts with me. I'm the first one looking myself in mirror."

Suddenly, UConn is in "bubble" territory and its last out-of-conference game, against Harvard, which is ranked in the 20s, at Gampel Pavilion on Wednesday night, takes on inflated tournament proportions.

In 1989-90 — yes, the Dream Season — things got off on the wrong foot the last time UConn lost its first two conference games. The AAC is not the Big East, in more ways than one. It won't have as many ranked teams, but it doesn't have as many teams in it either, and as Cincinnati's Mick Cronin predicted before the season, there is more quality, if less quantity. "The league has changed, but I think our 10-team league is pretty damn good," SMU coach Larry Brown said.

Road wins, if this Texas trip was any indication, won't be easy to accumulate, either. Cincinnati, Louisville, Rutgers and South Florida have always been tough rooms for UConn teams to work — the Huskies, in fact, lost their most recent games in all four places. And while UConn was losing at SMU, Cincinnati was winning at Memphis.

The Huskies, then, will have to protect their home court, at the very least. When SMU and Houston come to Connecticut later this season, more than just pride will be involved — those will be must-win games.

Just as the AAC does not offer as many top-echelon teams as the old Big East, it becomes more important that UConn win the winnable games in the conference. Where a 9-9, or even 8-10 record in the old conference might have been good enough for entry into the NCAA Tournament – in fact, 8-10 was good enough for UConn two years ago — it's hard to imagine an AAC team getting in without a minimum of 11 wins in the conference, 22 or 23 wins overall.

When Shabazz Napier and his teammates ran off the court with the last-second victory over Florida on Dec. 2, the last thing anyone would have believed would have been that the Huskies, just a month later, would have to scramble to make the tournament. That win, alone, along with other nonconference wins, figured to put UConn in a strong position.

How did they get here?

"We've got to play strong basketball, 'together' basketball, and we can play with anybody," Kevin Ollie said the night before the Houston game. "If we don't have that going for us, we can get beat. We have to understand that, and our fans have to understand that."

In the two games at Texas, UConn did not play well — and by its own admission, did not play hard. Ryan Boatright repeated "lack of effort and intensity" as the cause after both losses, and it is a rare and troubling sign when a team is talking about those things after two consecutive games.

Ollie was asked after the game Saturday if the Huskies had responded with the toughness for which he had called:

"The tough things I talked about," he said, "the two things right up at the top of the list — getting 50-50 balls and boxing out, we didn't do either, didn't play bring ball pressure, didn't play defense. … So, no."

UConn did not get to the 50-50 balls in either game, Ollie said, and against SMU they missed a number of layups – Ollie estimated a dozen. The Huskies' big men — and Ollie has started Phil Nolan, Amida Brimah and Tyler Olander in search of one — are not going strong to the basket and finishing plays. With no inside game, it's inevitable that defenses will take away the perimeter game, on which UConn lived high the first 10 games of the season. Everything broke down.

It's early, but there can now be no excuse for a lack of urgency this week, against either Harvard or Central Florida. The latter comes to Gampel on Saturday in the Huskies' first AAC home game.